Country Harvest (Houston, Texas)

From the Houston Chronicle, 1995
Before I split it off for this post, the Antoine Drive in Houston page mentioned 1010 Antoine, which used to be SteaKountry Buffet. However, it didn't start as SteaKountry, it started out as Country Harvest, a buffet restaurant out of California, in spring 1995 (sitting in the IKEA parking lot). By fall 1995, the restaurant's chain only other location (in Richardson) would close. While it seems that it closed by the end of December 1996 it quickly reopened as SteaKountry Buffet, a name it would have for a number of years afterward. When it became SteaKountry Buffet, it started serving some Mexican dishes (even advertising in a Spanish-language section in the Houston Chronicle in 1997) though changed hands in 2009 and by 2017 was serving exclusively Mexican dishes. By 2018 it adopted its current name, Ranchero King Buffet.

While I talked about IKEA briefly in my Katy Freeway page, there was another building near the IKEA, a strip mall (1020 Antoine), which remained until the store was rebuilt in the early 2000s. This was a strip center; one of the old listings has Supercuts as one of the tenants (Suite C). Most recently (August 28, 2025) an article appeared on Ranchero King Buffet on the Chronicle's website.

Finally I should mention that where IKEA and Ranchero King Buffet sit today was once an apartment complex, 1002 Antoine. I looked up and down for a name for these apartments--newspaper archives, city directories, and more, but just couldn't find one, despite the fact it had at least 150 units.

Abandoned Exprezit! Store (Quincy, Florida)

Can you see the gas station through the weeds? (Picture by author, August 2025)
A few years ago I was delighted to find that someone had taken a picture of an Exprezit gas station and convenience store. It wasn't the same store my family stopped in December 2003 (yes, a week or so before the picture in Marianna was taken by Tod Allen). I'm pretty sure some Exprezit! stores even made to Louisiana (some were planned for South Texas circa 2006) but a few years later they disappeared as quickly as they came, with only a few camped out in their home of North Carolina, despite once having sizable Florida presence (reduced to maybe one store in Florida today).

This Exprezit store escaped being rebranded (many are BP or 76 today) because it closed a while back, not even on the 2006 locator list, nor on a 1999 list (guess it purchased it and closed in that timeframe). It's an old gas station, too, dating to around the 1980s and in 1994 was a Texaco advertising t-shirts and ice cream; however, the convenience store name is too hard to see in that photo. Looking through old Google Earth images no cars appear in it from 2005 on so I would suspect Exprezit kept the 43 Spooner Road location and abandoned it by that time, and it's been shut ever since. The long driveway (no dedicated left turn, even) likely discouraged travelers on I-10. I noticed it when I spotted the distinctive red, blue, and yellow Exprezit insignia and had to check it out, though it was gated off. Only in the last two years was the gas island canopy demolished so there has been some activity of some sort going on; I would guess it was for the early stages of a building renovation that never happened.

As I never got to go inside an Exprezit in their heyday, I have no idea what their draw was especially as they tried to expand west. Their stores were in old, pre-existing locations, tired by even 2002 standards, and didn't supplement them with trendy new restaurant co-brand locations as was in vogue in those days.

Thank you for reading! As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I will try to make a 50-50 mix of Carbon-izer or other legacy content mixed with entirely new content.

UPDATE 09-04-2025: The more I look at this location (2982 Pat Thomas Pkwy.) from the past, it looked like it could be a Stuckey's, between its offerings and logos. Indeed, it does seem to be listed here in a 1992 directory!